All-women pink booths for panchayat elections
The Bengal SEC has decided to set up all-women polling stations called ‘pink booths’ across the state for the panchayat elections.
The Bengal State Election Commission (SEC) has decided to set up ‘pink booths’ for the panchayat elections on July 8, which would be run completely by women.
This was revealed through a letter issued by the SEC on June 17 to the district panchayat election officer and district magistrate of Murshidabad, and copied to all the district panchayat election officers and district magistrates of the state.
It has not been decided, though, how many pink booths would be set up.
History of pink booths
A post dated April 22, 2018 on the ECI’s official Facebook page defines a ‘pink booth’ as an ‘all-women managed polling station’, where ‘the entire polling staff, including the police and security personnel, shall be women’. The reason for setting up such booths is, as explained in the post, to promote ‘gender equality and greater constructive participation of women in the electoral process’.
In practice, many of these booths also have pink décor—like pink walls, pink curtains, pink balloons, and even the election officials dressed in pink.
Pink booths were first set up by the Karnataka SEC during the 2018 assembly elections, called ’sakhi booths’ (‘sakhi’ means ‘woman’). In 2019, the ECI adopted this concept across the country. Pink booths were set up in the states of Sikkim, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Punjab, Delhi, Goa, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Odisha.
Pink booths were also set up in the 2022 Odisha panchayat elections, 2023 Karnataka Assembly elections and some nagar palika parishad (urban local body) and panchayat elections in Uttar Pradesh in 2023.
